Nvidia attacks bundles with bundles

It is that time of the year again, all of a sudden people feel a big urge to spend a lot of money and on Christmas gifts, at least in the western hemisphere. Nvidia has just announced that starting with October 28th if you get Geforce 660 or GTX 760 you get a free copy of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Splinter Cell Blacklist. This is not a bad deal considering that EVGA’s SuperClocked GeForce GTX 660 sells for $174.99 ($149.99 after $25 rebate card) and if you get this card today, EVGA also throws in a free copy of Batman Arkham Origins.

The GTX 760 sets you back $249.99 plus shipping and it even gets you two games, Batman and Rise of the Triad w/ registration but this probably goes on until the 28th until these two games get replaced with two new ones. Nvidia also tells its customers that in case they buy a GTX 770, GTX 780 or a Titan, it will offer an additional, third game, a free copy of Batman: Arkham Origins. Titan is a $999 card and just to put things in perspective AMD gives you 8 games with the old Radeon HD 7990 that sells for $599.

We like the fact that Nvidia buyers stand to get a free copy of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag as the game looks awesome and Splinter Cell in etail sells for at least $39.99. Nvidia’s move can be seen as a refresh of an attack tactic and it is interesting to see that Nvidia launched a nice bundle just weeks after they tried to convince Fudzilla so hard that bundles didn’t help AMD boost its graphics sales. Yeah right.

Have in mind that AMD’s new R9 R280, R9 R270 or lower-end Radeon cards won't get you a bundle, but the older Radeon 7970 and 7800 series will. AMD has told us that this will change, despite the email we got from an AMD gaming PR who denies the story despite the fact that it was confirmed by AMD VP of Sales Roy Taylor, who told us that bundles will return shortly with Rx200 series products and the Battlefield 4 bundle is the only one public so far.

Fighting bundles with bundles clearly benefits gamers, so we love it. There’s no more price wars, but bundle wars could be the next big thing.

But that’s not all. To celebrate the production release of PC game streaming to Shield, Nvidia says its also offering $50-$100 off the purchase of an Nvidia Shield with your GTX purchase. So while it's not exactly bundling Shield with GTX cards, it certainly looks like that. Many suspected all along that this might be part of Nvidia’s Shield and Tegra Note strategy. In fact, some may even argue that this is a bit like AMD's old strategy, where you could get discounts for buying an AMD processor, motherboard and graphics card.